Reverend Charles Foster Johnson

Friday, January 23, 2004

It is my great pleasure to stand before this fine congregation and wholeheartedly affirm my support and solidarity for the state of Israel. When Rabbi Block graciously extended this invitation to me several months ago, I remembered Rabbi Stahl's similarly kind invitation to address myself to the same topic at a Pro-Israel rally held at the Alamo in the spring of 2002. Some of you were present that day. I shall never forget it. I shared the rostrum with another minister of our city whose support for Israel seemed to be predicated on the condemnation-- even eradication-- of other peoples and nations. His speech was incendiary and inflammatory. The crowd gathered that day was incited to a frenzy of animosity for Palestinians. It was evident that the throng congregated at that hallowed shrine of freedom believed freedom and liberty to be exclusive rewards accorded a few, rather than inalienable rights accorded persons by virtue of their irreducable humanity.

It was my difficult charge that day to follow this speaker. I spoke in equally passionate terms of the great contributions that Israel has given the family of nations regarding the dignity and worth of the individual, made in the image of a God that is sovereign over all humanity, not just a select portion of it. I spoke of the unprecedented vision of Israel that "the Lord our God is one," giving humanity the sublime concept of monotheism. I spoke of the democratic imagination that was first fired in the minds of Israel's prophets, that the blessing of this Sovereign God would be extended to all nations and all peoples. When I finished there was no cacophanous applause, no noisy din of cheers. Nothing but silence and reflection. Perhaps it's easier to get worked up into a rampage of division, than it is to be reasoned into a path of peace. But we all know in our hearts which choice the God of Israel would have us make.

I stand tonight to affirm and celebrate Israel for the same reasons I gave that rally two years ago. I would like to rehearse those for the next several minutes. Because I am a preacher and a minister and not an expert in international affairs, I will try to stay in categories that are moral and theological rather than political. But, the moral and the political should have everything to do one with another in a free society, and I hope to show that they are inextricably connected.

I love Israel because of her wonderful vision of the Fatherhood of God for all peoples. It was Israel that first gave humanity the splendid unifying principle of One God. Prior to this understanding, God was nationalistic and naturalistic, that is, reflective of diverse ethnic tribes and natural phenomena. Instead of inspiring love and confidence in peoples, these god's fomented division, disunity, and fear. These numerous dieties were created in the image of human passions and apprehensions, and therefore were territorial and petty.

But, a people called the Israelites came to understand God as One, as a unified, cosmic Power that was also personally involved in the affairs of humanity. The encounter of Moses on Sinai reports the mystery and unity of this Awesome God. Moses was minding his own business in Midian, keeping his father-in-law's flocks, when God spoke to him out of a burning bush. At that holy place, God commissioned Moses to return to Egypt to lead the massive liberation of God's people out of Egyptian slavery. Moses asked God, "When I return to my people and they ask me the name of the one who sent me, what shall I tell them?" This is when God identified himself with the famous phrase, "I am who I am." God commanded Moses to say to his people that "I am has sent me to you." Scholars don't exactly know how to translate that mysterious Hebrew term, but it is clear that the word is to be treated as a verbal form of "to be." God says to Moses, "I am the One who is and I cause things to be."

The first four commandments in the Decalogue address themselves to this primal unity of the True Diety. The first commandment simply reports that God's people will have no other gods before the true God, because the devotion that God inspires leaves no room for divided loyalties. The second commandment requires us to abstain from any constructed images of this One True God, because no representation can adequately define or quantify God's mystery. My teacher in seminary, Glenn Hinson, explained it this way: God has a center, but God has no circumference. There is no possible rendition of God that could accurately convey God's eternal mystery and power. Don't even try. The third commandment prohibits us from using God's name wrongly, because to invoke the name of God is to assign the power and creativity of God, and to endorse the purposes of that God. The fourth commandment requires us to celebrate sabbath, so that we can remember our finite creatureliness over against the infinite creative power of God. These first four commandments were summed up nicely by another professor in seminary, Clyde Francisco, who came into what we called "Old" Testament class on the very first day, looked our young faces over carefully and soberly said, "Ladies and gentlemen, there is a God, and you are not he." Israel gave us this truth. (cf Exodus 20.1-11)

This foundational Divine Unity, this Fatherhood of God, produces two very important truths that tend to get easily lost in all our global wrangling and tangling. First, every person is created the image of God. Second, all the peoples of the world are kinspersons. Every last individual is made in the likeness of this True God and is imbued with an inalienable dignity and value. There is a sanctity, mystery and uniqueness of the human that is reflective of the Divine. Let this sink in. We would have no sense of the preciousness of human life, or of the fundamental human rights that must be secured and preserved for all peoples, if we did not believe that we proceed from the creative mind of a Loving God. The defining event of Hebrew history was the deliverance of God's people out of the bondage of a foreign power because oppression of any kind truncates and violates the core dignity and humanity of every person.

Therefore, we are all related. We all spring from the same source. Israel was the first people to understand this. But, I believe that this is precisely the moral truth that is being dangerously revised today. There is an insidious teaching coming, God forbid, even from some Christian pulpits that folks of other faiths do not seek the same God that Christians seek. The stunning insight that the Lord our God is one Lord is being compromised by certain spokespersons that want to revert back to territorial and national gods who advance only the narrow interests of their own religio-political point of view. We see preachers in America and preachers in Afghanistan saying basically the same thing: God belongs to my nation, my people, my point of view only, and to hell with everybody else. This is the moral blindness that reasonable people of faith must repudiate in the most stringent terms. Martin Luther King, whose memory San Antonians honored so triumphantly this past Monday, said it right: "Unless we learn to live together as brothers and sisters, we will perish as fools."

I think of the story of the two medieval knights who were traveling late one evening in the Middle Ages when they came upon each other in a clearing. Thinking that no other travellers would be journeying so late on that stretch of highway, each was surprised to see the other. In a tragic miscalculation, each interpreted the other's expressions of surprise as gestures of hostility. So they began to fight, to joust, each trying to run the other through with his lance, each of the noblemen decked out in full battle regalia with armor from head to toe. After several moments of intense battle, one finally pierced the other's armor and the vanquished foe fell from his steed, and lay bleeding and dying in the dust. The victorious knight climbed down from his horse, bent over his fallen opponent, pulled back the facemask, only to discover the image of his own blood brother. Those who were kinspersons had mistaken each other for mortal enemies. Let us not make this neurotic miscalculation too. Let us, in the words of John Claypool, have eyes to see "our enemy as our brother, rather than our brother as our enemy."

I have every full conviction that a workable, just peace can and will be established in the Middle East. At present, voices of extremism and division seem to have seized the momentum, but this will not persist. There will arise prophetic voices of moderation and reason on both the Israeli and Palestinian side, that will advocate the clear will of the people to secure a lasting peace. The United States must lead in brokering this peace. Politicians whose programs clearly are imperiled by any such brokerage must be isolated and exposed by our policy. There will always be forces who wish for peace never to be established, and they will always seek to foist their terror on unsuspecting populations. Leaders must employ unswerving resolve to stay the course of peace in the face of terrorism. Furthermore, the US must join Israel and the centrist Muslim nations in executing a massive economic plan of construction and reconstruction for the entire region. This work will be rudimentary at first, but will eventually lead to the cultivation of markets that will decentralize the wealth and accord the blessings of self-determination to much-manipulated populations. This extraordinary work will take a generation, and will require a "long obedience in the same direction," but it will eliminate the conditions that give rise to terror and those who would traffic in it.

As God's people, Jews and Christians and Muslims, let us see the community of faith as a centered set rather than a closed set. Let us see the true and living God at the center, a center of love and unity, and all the peoples of the world who seek to love and serve God as moving toward that holy, burning Center. I see no boundary to this set. It is not bound. It is perfectly open. It is not defined by its circumference, but by its Center. If it possessed a boundary there would be some on the outside and some on the inside, and there would be doctrine and dogma determining who's in and out. Indeed, some may be close to the Center, some may be far away, but all the persons constellated around this Center are related one to another.

Israel is our best hope in a miserably troubled region for the preservation of human rights for all persons in that region and throughout the world. Israel is enriched by democratic institutions and the open markets that fuel free societies. The democratic impulses of Israel proceed inexorably from the moral understanding of God as our Central Source and humans made in the character of that God of freedom. As one of our country's first leaders put it, "the God who gave us life gave us liberty too." Terrorism is a hideous violation of the sanctity of life not only-- indeed, not chiefly-- because it steals innocent human life, but, rather, because it shuts down the trusts and liberties that open societies require, forcing those societies into an ever-increasing erosion of civil liberty. That is why terrorism in all its malevolent forms must be categorically denounced by all freedom-loving peoples everywhere.

There is a wonderful story buried in 2 Kings that tells about an episode when the Syrian army invaded the nation of Israel, and Israel responded with her characteristic strength and dignity. One day the king rose early in the morning and saw that the entire city was surrounded by chariots and armies. He went to the prophet Elisha and asked, "What shall we do?" Elisha prayed (something that prophets do instinctively) that God strike the invading Syrian army with blindness. God answered Elisha's prayer, and the entire Syrian army was stricken blind. Elisha said to the invaders, "This is not the way." Meantime, though the text doesn't spell it out exactly, the king must have seized the moment, and got busy disarming his handicapped opponent, because the king comes to Elisha and asks, not once but twice, "Shall we slay them? Shall we slay them?" The prophet answered with a resounding, "No!" Rather, Elisha commanded the king, "set bread and water before them and let them go." And the last line of this wonderful story reads, "and the Syrians came no more to raid the land of Israel." (2 Kings 6.15-23).

What Elisha did was insert what Glen Stassen calls a "surprising transforming initiative" into the entire downward, out-of-control spiral of violence. It was utterly surprising because the conventional, predictable wisdom would have been to eradicate the enemy while the prospects for complete extermination were good. Elisha's wise counsel was transformative, because it changed the entire outlook and perspective of the opposing nation toward its foe. Now, history certainly cannot corroborate that the story held true to modern times. But we do know that Dr. King's insight is right on: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will do nothing but leave us all blind and toothless." It is this surprising transforming initiative that Israel must imagine and present into the calculus of chaos now controlling the situation in Jerusalem and Gaza and the West Bank.

As a Christian, I love Israel because she is the last best hope for democracy, justice, righteousness, liberty, diginity, and peace in a war-weary land. One of her rabbis was teaching a group of boys on the lessons of peace one day, and asked, "When can you tell when the night ends and the day begins?" One of the boys answered, "When you have enough light to tell a fig tree from a grapevine?" "No," the rabbi smiled. Another boy raised his hand and offered, "When you have enough light to distinguish a dog from a goat?" "No," the rabbi corrected. "Listen, boys. The night ends and the day begins when from a distance you can see a stranger walking down the road, and recognize him as you own brother or sister."

I hope Israel will always have enough of that light. Amen.

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